Current state of multi-core awareness

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 4:41 PM,  <dsavage at peaknet.net> wrote:

> Of the thousands of 64-bit F10 applications/tools/utilities, I wonder how
> many are aware of and can scale across multiple cores. Has anyone done a
> recent survey to see which packages are [not] multi-core aware?

I may be way off-base here, but I would expect very few if any apps
are "multi-core aware". Multiple cores get you better performance when
more than one process needs the cpu, but a single I/O-limited process
isn't going to go any faster. Likewise, single-threaded apps can't do
anything with multiple cores even if they aren't I/O limited.
Specialized parallel-programming apps are a different matter, but how
many of those do we typically see on a desktop?

poc